While in America, Daschle, Geithner and Killifer have gotten dinged for not paying their taxes, Italy offers a sense of perspective:
A Milan court on Tuesday handed down a ruling that would send the political establishments of many countries into a tailspin. It found the British lawyer David Mills guilty of taking $600,000 in exchange for lying to protect the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
In Italy, the ruling did not even lead the evening news.
That honor went to Mr. Berlusconi’s main political rival, Walter Veltroni, who stepped down on Tuesday after his party’s solid defeat on Monday in the election for governor of Sardinia, where the Democratic Party incumbent lost to the son of Mr. Berlusconi’s tax lawyer. So the story of the day was not of corruption but of Mr. Berlusconi’s ever-expanding grip on power in Italy.
Bribery illegal? Well, only for some:
Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi was a co-defendant until last year, when he pushed through Parliament a law granting top officials, notably him, immunity from prosecution while in office.
Yet in the topsy-turvy logic of Italian politics, the ruling seemed less a defeat for Mr. Mills than still another victory for Mr. Berlusconi, who in 15 years of dominating Italian political life has managed to turn every legal setback into political capital.
One supposes that this is what Cheney had in mind when pushing for a full pardon of Scooter Libby in January. Cheney and Berlusconi. What’s the difference? One of them has a sense of humor:
Most Italians can barely keep Mr. Berlusconi’s many legal cases straight. It seems he barely can, either.
“I’m the universal record-holder for the number of trials in the entire history of man — and also of other creatures who live on other planets,” he said last year.
We should only be so lucky with Dick.